The Other Half of the Coconut: Women Writing Self-Respect History

The Self-Respect Movement launched by Periyar (E.V.Ramasami Naiker) in 1926 questioned the ways in which the lower castes were systematically excluded from the Indian nation and constructed as the ‘Other’ by the Brahmin elites. While Periyar’s role within the movement has received critical and scholarly attention, women Self-Respecters and the issues they raised have gone largely unnoticed. This collection of essays and fiction by women Self-Respecters, translated from the Tamil, could serve as the material basis for writing an alternative history of the movement. In mapping the voices of women who identified with the movement, this anthology helps us arrive at a different and richer understanding of what the Self-Respect movement stood for. There is an urgent need not only to improve upon existing Self respect histories, but also to critique the ways in which they have so far been written. This anthology provides a basis for such critique.

K SRILATA is Professor of English at IIT Madras where she teaches Creative Writing and Literatures in Translation. She is the editor of the anthologies The Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry, Short Fiction from South India (2009), All the Worlds Between: A Collaborative Poetry Project Between India and Ireland (2017) and Lifescapes: Interviews with Contemporary Women Writers from Tamil Nadu (2019). Her translations include two novels by the Tamil writer R Vatsala – Once There was a Girl and The Scent of Happiness. Srilata is also a poet and a fiction writer. She was writer in residence at Sangam house, India, Yeonhui Art space, Seoul and the University of Stirling, Scotland. Her most recent poetry collection The Unmistakable Presence of Absent Humans was published in 2019.